The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!

Even if seahorses were thrown back, they'd be unlikely to survive after tangling with fishing gear and getting dragged across the bottom, according to Foster. "We consider a caught seahorse, a dead seahorse," she said. "We need marine protected areas and trawlers to say away from coasts." Bettina Balnis / Guylian Seahorses of the World

By Amy McDermott

Behind the scenes at the California Academy of Sciences, baby potbellied seahorses roamed a tall, bubbling tank. They used their prehensile tails to cling to seagrass and to one another. The babies were small and slim as a finger, but as adults, they'd grow that eponymous potbelly, and wobble about, on display in the Academy's Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco.